Figure 42.1 Students collaborate to develop a presentation of recommendations.
One way to approach game design is to treat the game as an instantiation of a particular model describing an aspect of conflict. By this understanding, a game designer seeks to build out a “sandbox” that allows players to inhabit an artificial world whose actors, environments, and rules align as closely as possible with those of the model, whether conceptual or formal.1 This approach to game design is particularly effective when working with practitioners, because it allows a firmer connection between their intuitive, experiential understanding of key problems and more abstract understandings provided by academic models and theories. This chapter briefly describes this method of game design and discusses how it can be operationalized for both educational and analytical purposes.
To illustrate how this approach works in practice, I explore examples of games created to support the US Department of Defense’s College of International Security Affairs (CISA) by the Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL) at the National Defense University (NDU). The college aims to educate midcareer national security professionals from the United States and partner nations about counterterrorism and irregular warfare at the strategic level. By picking games done for the same organization, both studying how states can better combat irregular threats in West Africa, I hope to focus attention on how understanding games as instantiations of models will change the game’s form depending on the game’s purpose.
To start, it is important to understand how this definition of gaming differs from other common definitions used by US government gamers. Games are most often defined as a “warfare model or simulation not involving actual military forces, in which the flow of events is affected by and, in turn, affects decisions made during the course of those events by players” (Perla 1991). However, it is often more helpful to see a game as an instantiation, or a representation in a concrete case, of a model rather than as a model in and of itself. Because of games’ strong narrative content, it is rare to see a game that is divorced from the specificity of time and place. This context means games usually cannot be generalized in the way many models are. To draw on a metaphor from the social sciences, a game is less the equivalent of a scholar’s model of conflict than it is the case study the author uses to illustrate or test his or her model.
Instead, I argue that a game is an instantiation of a model in which key independent variables (or inputs), dependent variables (or outputs), or both are human decisions. Based on this rendering, games can also broadly be conceived as having three elements: environment, roles, and rules. The environment describes the tangible or intangible landscape that will be affected by the model. The actor (or more often actors) are the decision-making entities attempting to affect the environment, which the game’s players will represent through the roles that are assigned to them. Finally, the rules lay out the causal mechanisms by which the actor can make decisions and how those decisions will impact the environment.
This reconception of the relationship between games and models is important not only for game designers, who should be cautious when making claims that treat their game’s finding with more authority then they would a single case, but also in shaping participants’ relationship with the game. Regardless of whether a game is analytical or educational, game design should seek to create a space where participants can interact with a model in a specific and concrete way. Interaction is a particularly valuable aspect of games when used with audiences whose understanding of a phenomenon is based on experience rather than abstract modeling. This is sometimes known as “metis” knowledge (Scott 1990): knowledge that is implicit and learned through personal experience.
If the purpose of the game is educational, the designer aims for participants to interrogate and absorb the model by demonstrating first, how a world described by a model would work, and second, how that artificial world parallels reality in ways that make what is learned in the game helpful in real life. Based on this premise, all game design choices aim to align the key elements of the game’s environment, player roles, and rules of play to the key aspects of the model: environment (or context), actors, and mechanisms. In practice, this usually involves the game designer selecting a real or fictitious example of a phenomenon of conflict and describing each element in a way that is consistent with the model.
To give a concrete example, the educational game “Connected Shadows” depicted a current irregular conflict according to some of the theories taught at CISA. The classroom model emphasized two basic types of violent non-state actors: those with a large base of popular support who use violence as a means to a political goal, and those with little support who rely on violence as a goal in and of itself. The model then focuses attention on the role of grievances, particularly those rooted in political, economic, social, historical, and geographic inequalities, and the role they serve in motivating the population to take up arms. Next, the model focuses on the desired end goals of both the national government and the non-state actor(s), how each actor seeks to achieve them, and what tools are available. This is intended to reveal not only the strategy of each actor, but also when the actions of either actor are not being effectively countered by the other. Finally, the public narrative of both the threat group(s) and government are analyzed. Based on this assessment, a strategy is then designed to counter the threat group by identifying and countering the enemy’s center of gravity, correcting the policies fueling grievances, ensuring the government is countering the strategy of the insurgents, and developing an effective counternarrative.
Connected Shadows was built to instantiate this model by presenting a case study of irregular warfare in the Sahel region of Africa examining political violence in Mali, Algeria, and Nigeria. Connected Shadows was run as a seminar-style game, meaning that game play consisted of discussions between players without the assistance of formal mechanics such as dice, cards, boards, or specialized computer interfaces to reproduce the dynamics of the model. Instead, the model was manifested in the information about the environment given to the students, the instructions that laid out the rules of the road for each section of the game, and the descriptions of the roles students were to assume during the game. Students then played the game by assuming their assigned role and engaging in debate to determine collective analytic conclusions and desired actions. These were then formalized in a PowerPoint briefing that could be shared with other groups.
Prior to the exercise, students were assigned to focus on Nigeria, Algeria, or Mali and given a substantial primer on their assigned country and how it has been impacted by ongoing conflicts. While these documents included several maps and a short description of the geography of the country, far more attention was given to describing key social structures, political institutions, economic conditions, and historical narratives. Additionally, information in each section was carefully tailored to highlight the same issues that the CISA model emphasized as important to understanding the conflict. For example, the discussion of Malian politics focused on dynamics seen as being important to fueling conflicts, such as the substantial political role of the military and limited franchise for Northern minority groups, rather than presenting the political situation in the way a general article would. Thus, the read-ahead materials not only established an environment in which decisions were to be made, but they also primed students to be aware of the issues seen as particularly salient to a grievance-based model of political violence.
On the first day of the game, students were presented with their roles and the rules of the game in a series of memos. These documents laid out a series of fictitious security incidents in each country that was depicted as a catalyst for the governments of Algeria, Mali, and Nigeria to each undertake a systematic review of their strategies to counteract threats to their government. These documents also informed students that, for the purposes of the game, they had been selected to advise a strategy review of their assigned country based on their personal experience and previous education. They were tasked to produce an analysis of the conflict and recommend courses of action to respond to violence using the CISA model.
During the first day of the exercise, students worked in small groups to prepare a briefing of their assessment of the conflict and their recommended course of action for their assigned country. To a casual observer, each seminar room must have looked like a slightly out-of-control classroom, with faculty observing from the sidelines while students debated and built out briefing slides to convey their analyses and recommendations.
Figure 42.1 Students collaborate to develop a presentation of recommendations.
The second and third day of gameplay proceeded in roughly the same way, with one major change. On the second day students were ask to change the role they assumed. Whereas on the first day students filled the role of advisors to the government, on the second day they changed roles to advise the leaders of the threat groups challenging the government. Thus, rather than use a predefined scenario or group of subject matter experts to determine what would occur next, students themselves served as the game umpire and determined what the threat group would do as a result of their initial actions as the government. On the third and final day of the exercise, students switched back to playing the role of advisers to the government and were able to update and finalize their strategy based on what students playing the threat group in the previous move projected would occur. Students then presented their findings to panels of faculty members for feedback.
While compared to a traditional role-playing game, board game, or the more rigid worlds of video or computer games, the events described above may seem extremely unstructured. However, each element of gameplay was designed to closely mirror the environment, roles, and rules highlighted in the CISA model of irregular warfare. This was particularly evident in the way the key environmental factors of the model were represented in the game. Whereas a game focusing on a more conventional warfare environment would primarily represent physical geography, CISA’s model of irregular warfare is primarily concerned with the social structure and preferences of the population (known as a population-centric perspective in military circles). Thus, where a conventional World War II battle game might present the environment as a map describing the hills, roads, and forests of a geographic area, the environment of Connected Shadows focused on building out a view of the society of each country through written documents.
The same parallelism between CISA’s model and its instantiation in the environment of Connected Shadows can be seen with regard to roles. Over the course of the exercise, students took on the role of both major actors in the model: the national government and the organization(s) using violence to undermine the government. The game’s level of analysis and motivations were also consistent with that of the original model. For example, as the government, students were asked to recommend a whole-of-government strategy, rather than advising a single subunit of the government, in line with the model’s belief in the importance of an integrated national approach. Similarly, game materials presented the motivations of non-state users of political violence as deeply rooted in grievances. This depiction of the threat group’s motivation primed students to focus their analysis (regardless of perspective) on a grievance-based model of conflict causation rather than considering competing models.
Finally, the rules of the game were perhaps the most direct instantiation of the CISA model of any element of the game. Students were asked to complete their analyses using the same prompting questions that faculty used in class to cue analysis of conflict. These questions focused students on determining the nature of the threat to the state, the role that grievances played in motivating participation in violence, the areas in which non-state actors’ actions were not met by the state with effective countermeasures, and the role of narrative in shaping popular support. Furthermore, rather than an outside team determining the effects of player teams’ strategies, players determined the results of their own actions when they took on alternative roles during the second and third day of play. These game elements were designed to more fully embed the players in the model to increase their understanding of the rules it proposed.
In contrast to the educational model of Connected Shadows, if the purpose of the game is analytical, the designer helps participants instantiate their own (often mental and underarticulated) models in the game to improve and disseminate understanding of a phenomenon. While the structure of game elements may be similar to those of an educational game, the purpose of an analytic game is to open a space for critique so that the model instantiated in the game can be refined based on the participants’ experience. Therefore, the goal of an analytical game designer is to provide a point of comparison for participants’ intuitive mental model of a particular aspect of conflict, which they may not be able to articulate directly. When done in a group, this can be a particularly useful way of highlighting differences between participants’ understanding of the problem by creating a common reference point in which the participants are not directly vested.
One example of this approach is “Scattered Lights,” which was used as part of CISA outreach to current strategic practitioners. This game allowed for established experts to challenge both the school’s framework (described earlier) and their own understanding of current topics of interest to the policy community. A team of American, French, and Nigerian security professionals that were concurrently assessing Mali sought to improve shared understandings of the problem on the ground, available tools, and approaches to managing the conflict. This exercise was run at the same time as a student seminar-style game that looked at irregular conflict in Mali; the student game was very similar in structure and content to Connected Shadows. However, at the same time the students were working on their assessments of the conflict and recommended actions for both the government and the violent non-state actors, the practitioners engaged in a shorter exercise that focused on developing options for international support.
While the basic setup of Scattered Lights had many of the same elements as Connected Shadows, when used with an expert audience their purpose was rather different. While the game materials provided structured information regarding the environment, roles, and rules, the game design team assumed that the most critical information that would shape experts’ game play was their existing mental models of both Mali and their understanding of irregular warfare more generally, which had been build up throughout their professional careers.
Figure 42.2 Students debate their irregular warfare strategy.
At the beginning of the exercise, the expert group was asked to take on the role of the international stakeholder community to develop a strategy, including a desired end state for Mali and what the international community could do to assist the government in reaching that state. Both the roles and rules given the group paralleled what students were assigned. However, the experts’ rules and roles were less directive in order to allow them to critique, add to, or alter the model’s understanding of key actors when needed. To ensure that this looser structure did not translate into unproductive discussion, a member of the game design team facilitated the discussion. When participant discussion revealed that they disagreed with the way the game depicted a element of the environment, roles, or rules, the facilitator was able to prompt participants for a more complete explanation of how they felt the issue worked, and solicit input from other experts to determine how widely held the alternative model might be.
This model of game design effectively reverses the process of the education model: Instead of the designer teaching a model by instantiating it in a game, the participants effectively teach the game designer their mental models through their discussion. Over the course of the game, players instantiated a new model, first implicitly though the understandings shared by players in the discussion. This understanding was then formalized in written documents complied by the game designers to document the new model.
In the case of Scattered Lights, expert participants’ collective understanding touched on key aspects of the environment, roles, and rules. For example, participants felt that the environment needed to be regional rather than national, because of the greater importance they placed on the transnational nature of key drivers of conflict. The group of experts also identified many international actors as worth analyzing more fully then the classroom model definition of roles suggested. Finally, the exercise revealed that while participants generally shared the classroom model’s view that non-state actors’ use of violence is rooted in political, economic, and social grievance, the experts treated the capacity of the government to resolve these longstanding issues as an open question, rather than a stated necessity. Combined with other findings, these assessments created an alternative vision of how irregular warfare occurs and how the state counters it.
Treating games as a sandbox can also allow more concrete reporting after the game. Because the game is designed to instantiate a specific model, reporting after the event can evaluate how well the game was able to depict specific elements of the model based on the evidence of student behavior. For example, following Connected Shadows, game designer analysis focused on evaluating how student products deviated from what was expected. By contrast, reports from Scattered Lights focused on where participants’ mental models deviated from the model taught in CISA classrooms. Because Scattered Lights was run several months prior to Connected Shadows, game designers were also able to use the experienced participants’ discussion to update and refine materials in advance of Connected Shadows. Furthermore, while both Connected Shadows and Scattered Lights were only run once, under other circumstances an iterative approach could be used to continue to refine and improve both games.
Regardless of whether the purpose of the game is education or analytical, the author has found treating games as instantiations of models, rather than as models in and of themselves, to be particularly helpful when working with practitioners, who have a great deal of “metis” knowledge learned through personal experience. This character can make it very hard for students to leverage their knowledge in the classroom, either because of the difficulty of connecting abstract theories to their lived experience or because the students cannot articulate how their experience-based mental model differs from the theory being presented in order to offer meaningful critique. Thus, using games to present abstract models as experience provides students with a more comparable parallel to their existing base of knowledge. For analytical games, where the goal is to formalize the knowledge the participants have gained though experience, treating game design as an instantiation created more flexibility to allow participants to contribute their understanding without risking an unstructured, and thus unproductive session. As a result, while the purpose of the game changes many design choices, the core principles of instantiating models serves a useful role in both contexts.
Students will be divided into three groups, each of which will represent a “world.” These groups will then run through the exercise in parallel. Within these groups, students will be further subdivided into three “country teams” focusing on Mali, Algeria, and Nigeria,2 respectively. If you have received this guide, then you have been assigned to represent the country of Algeria. Teams are free to communicate with the other country teams in their world and are free to organize in whatever way they find helpful. However, each of the nine country teams will be required to appoint two Briefers, who will be responsible for reporting out the team’s work. This position will rotate to other team members in subsequent “moves.”
During Moves 1, 2, and 4, students assigned to the three Algerian country teams (one to each “world”) will act as an advisory committee to the Government of Algeria. Between each move, the scenario will evolve, requiring new analysis in subsequent moves. At the onset of each move, students will be provided with a scenario update and tasking. They will then craft a statement of their understanding of the problem and proposed response they believe the Government of Algeria should pursue.
During Move 3, students will change to “Red Team” roles and act as leadership figures of the groups that threaten Algeria. As such, they will respond to the product that has been previously developed by a different world’s Algeria group by proposing reactions from the threat groups.
After all four moves, two individuals selected by each group will brief the group’s recommendations. At the end of the first three moves, students will brief other student teams. At the end of Move 4, students will brief the final product, which represents the culmination of the groups’ efforts, to a panel of CISA faculty and leadership.
Elizabeth Bartels is a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy analyst at RAND. Prior to joining RAND, she was a senior associate at Caerus Associates and a research analyst at CASL. Her work as a national security educator and analyst has focused on the operational and strategic levels of irregular and asymmetric conflict. Past projects have analyzed urban operations, insurgency, terrorism, cyber security, and Middle Eastern politics. Her current research focuses on the use of social science research design methods to improve wargame design and analysis. She received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago and holds a master’s degree in comparative political science from MIT.